Find resources / Group parenting programme / Keeping children safe / Body awareness

• Understand and support children's increasing body awareness.
• Prevent child abuse.

In this session we’re going to focus on two aspects of development:

• changing abilities
• gender and sexuality awareness.

The following questions and discussion might stir some memories and emotions for participants, so remember to check in that everyone is okay. Make it clear that the option is there to pass on some topics or questions.

You might also want to make yourself available outside of the workshop for anyone who may need additional support or the contact details for specific help services.

Ask the group:

• What does having ‘body awareness’ mean to you?
• What might it have to do with keeping our children safe?

Changing abilities

• A newborn arrives with just a few survival skills pre-wired in their brains that are mainly controlled by reflexes. It’s amazing how quickly new and more complex skills are developed. Many of those skills, like learning to balance and walk, take a lot of practice to progress from the first fumbling attempts to mastering it with ease. Just like an adult learning to drive a car, once mastery is achieved, it’s done almost automatically, with very little conscious thinking.
• Sometimes children can go into an autopilot mode too. For example, a baby who has just started crawling and is moving about freely might suddenly realise they’re a long way from a parent! Then they may become upset or anxious.
• Older children can also struggle with finding a comfortable balance between their drive for independence and their continuing need for the security that their parents provide. They may develop more or new fears as their awareness and understanding of the world increases.

Discuss the following questions in pairs, or as a group:

• Can you remember a time when you were doing something and you suddenly became scared or worried?
• How old were you?
• What were you doing?
• What happened?

Then:

• Can you remember having nightmares?
• How old were you?
• What were you doing?
• How did you manage to get back to sleep?

As children grow they watch the people around them and notice more about what they do and how they behave. They’ll start to notice differences between males and females, and even how their parents use the toilet.

If there’s a new baby in their whānau, they’ll learn about breast feeding. They’ll work out if baby is a boy or girl, comment and may even want to touch the ‘differences’.

During this awareness stage, they may also be learning to use the toilet and will be confirming their own gender. They might also become aware of different sensations in their genitals and want to explore that more fully.

If their baby is still quite young, participants might be thinking this developmental stage is a long way off for them. But raising their awareness early can help them to start thinking about how whānau behaviour and responses to concepts of sexuality and body awareness might impact on their child in the future.

• Being positive can be as simple as teaching baby the correct names for all their body parts.
• It might also involve thinking about the messages they give baby, verbal and non-verbal, when changing a dirty nappy. A facial expression that says to their baby that ‘this is yuck’ might unintentionally be telling baby that anything to do with their genital area is negative.
• A response to a dirty nappy that focuses on ‘getting all clean and comfortable again’ will give a more positive message. Through this approach, a child learns to feel comfortable with themselves and confident in talking about their body. In the future this confidence could help to keep them safe from people who may behave in ways towards them that are not okay.

Be really straight with the group that we are talking about:

• sexual abuse
• emotional abuse
• physical abuse.

If a child knows that they can come to their parents and be safe, that they can talk about anything and be believed, then this child is more likely to be safe.

Ask these questions and discuss in pairs, or as a group:

• When will you need to start talking with baby about being a boy or a girl?
• How might you do this?
• How comfortable are you with using the proper names for genitals?
• What names or words have you heard being used?
• Did you know what those names or words meant?
• How can you be sure that if your child wanted to tell you or someone else (for example, an early childhood education teacher) about something abusive that had happened to them, that you or they would understand?

Take some time to think about what’s been discussed. Ask participants to have a chat in pairs about what they think is the most important thing for them to think more about.